Founders at Work

Jessica Livingston

The clean, confident origin stories we hear about famous startups rarely match reality. This book gathers the founders' own accounts of just how uncertain and messy it actually was.

A collection of candid interviews with the founders of well-known startups, revealing the messy, uncertain reality behind their now-famous origin stories — near-failures, pivots, and lucky breaks that rarely make it into the polished later narrative.